A domain name is the address you type into your browser. For example Google’s domain name is google.com, Facebook’s domain name is facebook.com. It can have any of the available extensions on it such as .com, .org, .net, or .gov are a few examples.

If you are like most small businesses the first thing you want to do when you are making a decision to get a web site is to purchase a domain name that is your company name. After all, isn’t that how people find you in the yellow pages? Well, yes and no. People looking through the yellow pages first look for a keyword that describes your business. And then once they have found the list with all your competitors along with you they select one. That’s why years ago many companies business names started with a or aa.

The internet search engines such as Google work a bit differently. Once a viewer has typed in his keyword or keyword phrase, they are presented with a list of web sites that Google believes are pertinent to the keywords you have typed. Having a web site that does not have the keyword or words that you want to rank highest for in your URL (domain name) means you are at a disadvantage when it comes to ranking with Google. One of the most important factors with Google or any other search engine is does the keyword being searched show up in the domain name. There are of course many factors Google looks at but this is one of the key factors they use.

Keywords as you probably are aware play a significant role in SEO. So for example if the best keywords to people use to find your business are Raleigh roofing (you are a roofing contractor), then a keyword optimized exact match domain name might be raleigroofings.com. A phrase match domain name might be myraleighroofing.com and a broad match domain name might be roofinginraleigh.com a non keyword domain name might be kellycontracting.com.

As far as Google or other search engines are concerned they look at the domains like this:

——▶Exact Match = Highest Rank
——▶Phrase Match
——▶Broad Match
——▶Non Keyword

Getting the right keyword domain can save you time, money and most important months if not years of frustration. Next I will be discussing buying a new domain versus finding a great aged domain. Aged domains can provide a jump start on search engine dominance. And they might not be as expensive as you might think. Want to learn more? Please take a moment to email me or visit one of my websites at http://www.seoraleigh.net or http://www.1-localseoservices.com

Tutorial: Make More Money with WordPress, Social Media and Analytics

In todays article which is called Tutorial: Make More Money with WordPress, Social Media and Analytics, John does more than just write an article. It is an actual video of an hour and a half seminar he was speaking at just the other day. Don’t worry the seminar is not all about some get rich quick scheme or for that matter it’s not much about making money with a blog at all. What it is about is hard hitting and proven tips and tricks he follows to bring people in to read his blogs. He provides important information about a bunch of plug ins most of them free which are must haves and will enhance your blog visitors experience as well as make life much easier for you.

The best way to explain how important this video is would be to show you his introductory quote. It read:

“Most people try to take the horse to water and make him drink. Your job is make the horse thirsty!”

Think about that statement for a minute. John is not telling you how to make your web site blog better, he is telling you how to get people to your web site blog. And that is the thing most web sites never see are a ton of visitors. I know the video is long and it is hard to spare an hour and a half from most of our busy days with hectic schedules. But this is just too important if you are serious about using your site as a selling machine for your business. Here is a chart John used early on to help show how important social media is to bringing traffic into his blog and what social media worked the best. The results may shock you, as most of you probably think twitter is the top vehicle.

So make sure to click on the link to read One Mans Blog, and make sure to save it as a favorite. Most important is make sure to comment on any of the articles, and include a link back to your web site.. And believe me John has thousands of them. Some of his articles take him 20 hours or more to write. That’s why they are so good. This article about John’s One Man Blog Site and others teaching SEO can be found on my website at http://www.1-localseoservices.com/wordpress/ I can be reached by phone at 919-400-7423

If I am building a web site or doing SEO work for someone who already has a web site one of the first things I do is research what the best keywords and keyword phrases are for the company I am doing the work for. As I mentioned in earlier articles I rely heavily on Market Samurai. But it is not the only tool I use, another is Google’s Wonder Wheel. The reason I use wonder wheel is because Google uses the actual results from the keyword you are searching to find other search terms that real people have used before or after searching on the original search word(s) you entered. In other words I am picking Google’s brain to find out what other people who are searching for in addition to the keyword I am using as a start point. This valuable and critical information, because if you follow it out to several wheel you can trace the progression of keywords one might use to get to a buying decision. And finding the keywords people are using for buying decisions is critical to the ultimate success or failure of the web site I am working on.

I have been using the wonder wheel since it first came out. Recently Google has made this tool as an option when someone is searching on Google. It acts like a little suggestion box to help you refine your search options. A wheel will show with a number of spokes each spoke points to a different but similar search term that others have used along with the search term you just typed in. On the right hand side are the real time results you would normally see in Google. The difference here is when you click on any of the related search terms shown on the wonder wheel the results quickly change on the right hand side to reflect your choice. At the same time a second wheel appears with more choices off that wheel. Once again these choices are all based on real time searches done on Google. So it is easy to follow a sequence of searches that others may have taken. And for you to do the same.

Next time you do a search on Google make sure to click the show options and then scroll down to standard view where you will find Wonder Wheel listed. Click on it and enjoy a new way to search.

The point I am making here is that long tail keyword phrases are almost always used by people who are looking for more specific things. And as a rule they are further along in the buying process. Another example would be fences. A home owner may look up fences or Raleigh fences when just getting ideas for a fence. But when they are ready to buy they are more likely to look up Wood fence contractors in Raleigh, or wood fence costs Raleigh. The longer the tail word and the more specific it is the more likely they are not just browsing. when building your content for your web site it is always a great idea to do some research as to what the best buyers searches would be for your product or services and then spend some time optimizing a page of you web site for that long tail phrase. Note, make sure the phrase you are optimizing for gets some traffic daily. There is nothing worse than spending hours optimizing content for a particular keyword phrase only to later find out no one searches on that.

Market Samurai has several modules. But there are three I am going to talk about here. The first is keyword research. This module gives you all the information you need to choose the best keywords to optimize for. And if you use the keyword module correctly it can save you weeks or months chasing what you thought was a great keyword phrase only to find out later that there were additional long tail words that needed to be used for the bulk of the traffic you thought this keyword phrase had. In one quick search you can find not just the best keywords and phrases, but also find out how often it is searched daily, how many web sites use the same keyword or phrase, the percentage of phrase match searches out of broad match searches, the total number of global web site titles that have the keyword in it, info on adwords, including the cost for a keyword to get top view, and more. You can further filter out too competitive keywords or ones that don’t have enough searches, etc.

Now here is where the power of this program starts. With that information you can search to find where your sites rank for any keywords or phrases you want using the rank tracker module. You can compare that to your competitors, track as often as you want and record a history of where your site is ranking at any point in time. Watch as back links bring the site higher or as you site drops because you made a change. Track where google, yahoo or bing rank you. And see how long in days it has been since Google last crawled your site. You can see how many back links you or a competitor has. And you can find the page rank of any of these urls.

The last module I am talking about today is the SEO competition module. And with this module you can blow away your competition. It first goes out and pulls the top ten or so sites for the keyword or phrase you have chosen. Then you can manually add your or anyone’s url to this list to compare. It tells you the Page rank, index count (number of pages for this site indexed by google) back links, type of back links, number of .edu and .gov back links the site has. If the site is listed in yahoo, and dmoz, and whether the keyword you have chosen is in the title, URL, description and headers of the site. It also tells you how long since google last crawled. But the true power of this program is what comes next.

By clicking on a little triangle next to the url, you can then look at the back links in detail. Look at the page rank of your competitors back links. See some patterns, where they are getting the high page rank back links from. For example if they are commenting on a high page rank blog perhaps a page rank 6. If so how many times they are getting credited for that page rank blog. No longer do you have to sift manually through hundreds or even thousands of competitor back links to find the gems. And it does not stop there. You can then take a look at the next most important thing google looks at when determining where your site will rank. Anchor text analysis! See what anchor text your competitor is using with his links. This is the kind of information that can blow your competition right out of the water. Want to beat them and rank higher. Then you will know exactly what you are going to have to do, to win that fight.

Market Samurai Click this link and start creaming your competition today. If you like what you are reading, please consider linking to me from your web site.
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We start doing research on the clients web site first. Before I can begin a back link campaign I want to fully understand my client and his business. I want to know the acronyms used and I want to know how people search to find companies similar to his. With that information I begin to build a list of keywords that people would use to find a business like this. Once I have that list and I know which ones are being searched the most, then I begin to search for places I can submit back links to. And this is where most of these type articles end or at least it is as far as they get to actually revealing their secrets. Today you will find out exactly what I do.

The first thing I do is try to find a .edu or a .gov site (generally a blog) where I can leave a comment that will include a back link. To do this I go to Google and I type the following in: {keyword here} inurl:guest site:.edu So if I were looking for an attorney who handled bankruptcy cases where it says {keyword here} I might type bankruptcy (note remove the {} and just use the keyword with a space at the end)
A list of hundreds of .edu sites that might allow me to post are displayed.

You can choose any type site or not choose site at all in your search. Change it to .gov from .edu, or just remove site and it will search all site types. This is but one of hundreds of different ways I search the internet to find high quality back links for my clients. But it is a valuable one and if you are smart and use this tip alone it can put your site well on the way to a higher ranking in the search engines.

Remember Rome was not built in a day and Google is not going to move your rank from not even in the top 1000 to number #1 in a day. I have cases where it has taken months of hard work and hundreds of back links to get a site to where I want it to be. And not all back links you create will show on Google and most important, not within a couple days of when you create them. Sometimes weeks and yes, even months after I submit a back link will I see the results showing up. And many times, in fact most times back links may not show at all. I use a rule of thumb that for every back link I get I must submit four. Why not sign up today for a free site evaluation. Just click this link and we will take a look at your web site and make some recommendations. Site Survey

“First, we’re introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page.

Try searching for your favorite TV show, sporting event or the latest development on a recent government bill. Whether it’s an eyewitness tweet, a breaking news story or a fresh blog post, you can find it on Google right after it’s published on the web.”

What does this mean to you the small business guy. Well it means the following even when a consumer is searching for a local product or service such as house cleaning in Raleigh. If you owned a house cleaning business and you tweeted every day that person searching for Raleigh house cleaning might very well see your tweet as the number #1 response. A real time tweet that you recently tweeted. How cool is that? So if I were you, today I would get a twitter account and a username of either my business name or the most popular keywords if possible. And every day a couple times a day I would tweet something about my business. Of course you will need to find some followers first, perhaps customers who are already doing business with you and are twitterer’s. Might as well build a base of new business leads from twitter as well.

So what exactly are back links?  They are links from other web sites that point to your web site.  Let me give you an example, if you are like most people you get your new from the internet.  And when you go to your favorite site, you see links to a variety of news articles.  Those links are back links.  How do you get back links and what is important to Google.  I have found that back links come in all shapes and sizes.  What I mean by that is Google prefers to see back links that are somewhat related to your web site, but will accept back links from most places as long as they are not link farms.  Pay for a thousand back links from a link farm and you might be banished from Google completely.  So a back link can come from virtually any where.  For example highlight an article or section from your web site and then submit it to DIGG, or any one of hundreds of similar social bookmarking sites.  Here is a list of 64 sites just like DIGG you can submit links to.

Now submitting links to social bookmarking sites will generate some link juice with google, it is not exactly what I would call a quality back link.  Here’s a couple of tips to finding high quality back links for your web site.  Let’s say you have small business selling comforters and bedding.  You have a web site but you’re not getting found in google.  To get some quality back links you might do a search like this {keyword} inurl:category/guest where keyword is replaced with comforter.  By typing this into google search box comforter inurl:category/guest you will get results showing 58 links where you might be able to respond to blogs about comforters.  Because they allow guest posts, you should be able to include a link to your web site in your comment.  What I generally try to do when commenting in blogs is to add some actual interesting insight to the blog.  I also generally use something that relates to a keyword someone might search for when looking for me as the username.  So in this case I might have a username of Down Comforter.  Because most blogs will use that user name as the text for the back link to your web site.  Google will then find the back link see the text says Down Comforter and associate the keywords down comforter to your web site since that is where the link goes.

Want to know a very special key that will get you some of the highest quality back links you can get in Googles eyes?  That’s right I am talking about .edu or .gov links.  those back links are what I refer to as back link gold.  Meaning that if you have just a few .edu or .gov back links, you will see a rapid improvement in your search engine ranking.  I know of a local florist who is ranked number #1 for keyword {city} flowers mostly because they have four .edu backlinks.  The web site is under a year old and because of those .edu back links google has put them number #1.  Subscribe to this blog  and I will email you the secret to finding quality .edu back links.

Let’s first take a look at the Google Wonder Wheel.  It is one of the most amazing tools I have seen that are free.  If you were to ask SEO experts about LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) you could easily create a riot of the greatest magnitude.  It’s split about 50/50 whether this is real and google uses it to rank pages or that it is a myth and of no use.  With the two tools released by Google recently this case is closed.  As google uses LSI in both tools, and actually shows you what it wants.

First is the Google Wonder Wheel Check it out!  Go ahead and type the most important keyword or long tail keyword into the wheel.  Voila!  Google shows you the keywords that it feels are best associated with they phrase or word you type.  Want to dig deeper?  click on any of the words that are in the spokes and a whole new bunch of keywords shows up.  Now you have some serious insight into how google thinks your site should look like.  If you are missing some of these words or phrases then edit your web site and make the changes to reflect exactly what google wants.  Watch your ranking shoot up!

The other tool from Google is the sktool.  http://www.google.com/sktool This one settles the debate.  While there is a preponderance of evidence that LSI is not used by Google because it does not scale well, there is also a huge amount of evidence that google uses at least something similar to map relationships between keywords.

There is also a sense that sites with internal structured LSI and how they link to within and without the site somehow turbo charges the search engine rankings.  Try out this tool and see if it quickly pays off for you in better and higher rankings for those keywords your site uses.